Memorandum submitted by Arts Council England
INTRODUCTION
Arts Council England welcomes the opportunity
to contribute to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee
inquiry into new media and the creative industries. We note that
the Select Committee is undertaking two inquiries concurrently:
this inquiry into new media and the creative industries and, the
other into heritage. We believe that both these aspects of the
creative environment should be viewed together and would therefore
encourage the Select Committee to read our responses in conjunction
with each other.
This submission sets out our role, issues and
policies for the creative industries. For your reference, we have
also included additional supporting information in an appendix.
OUR ROLE
Arts Council England is the national development
agency for the arts in England. Between 2005 and 2008 we are investing
£1.7 billion of public funds in the arts from Government
and the National Lottery.
We are committed to making the widest range
of arts activities available to people across the country. To
achieve this we cross geographical, artistic and technological
boundaries. We encourage a wide range of artists to distribute
their work in England and internationally. Additionally we support
visits to England from outstanding international artists and arts
organisations. We fund work to be presented within different environments,
from traditional venues such as theatres and galleries, across
urban contexts such as in hospitals, schools, prisons and people's
homes. We support innovation through project funding and training
in digital practices for presentation across a variety of emerging
platforms: the Internet, wireless environments, interactive broadcast
and formats such as DVD, CD and digital photography. We also support
traditional distributed media such as print.
Arts Council England has set out ambitions for
the arts. From 2003 to 2006, these are:
— prioritise individual artists;
— work with funded arts organisations
to help them thrive rather than just survive;
— place cultural diversity at the heart
of our work;
— prioritise young people and Creative
Partnerships; and
— maximise growth in the arts.
We are also committed to creating a modern and
progressive Arts Council.
We work with a wide range of partners. We work
with the following to promote technological innovation: the Museums
Libraries and Archives Council, National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts, the UK Film Council, Regional Development
Agencies, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Higher Education
institutions.
Arts Council England:
— funds and supports the infrastructure
for the arts in this country, investing over £325 million
annually in regular funding to 1,100 arts organisations;
— invests £87 million annually
in individuals and organisations through our open application
programme, Grants for the Arts;
— invests £32 million a year in
our Creative Partnerships programme—recognised as a crucial
component in ensuring creativity in children and young people;
and[1]
— invests £26 million a year in
supporting strategic developmental activity and partnerships.
We recognise the importance of creativity and
the arts to individual fulfilment, civic renewal and to the economy.
The creative industries account for more than 8% of growth in
the UK.[2]
The arts are a key driver and increasingly are part of the way
in which people make their living. They provide the core skills
development in schools and higher education for all the creative
industries. Often they provide the career gateways—the first
jobs—for creative entrepreneurs and workers across the creative
industries.
The arts play a dynamic role within the new
media landscape, engineering concepts and testing user relationships.
Artists and arts organisations are robust and critical partners
in industrial projects and research and development. For example
Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University
are key partners in the European IPREG project with Sony. We welcome
the opportunities that new media and the creative industries offer
for developing creativity, for developing art forms, and for developing
greater access for more people to arts and culture. We see opportunities
for building bridges between arts organisations, promoters and
producers, the commercial sector, national broadcasters, and education
and training providers to create a more integrated and sustainable
national framework for the arts. We also recognise these new opportunities
bring new challenges in terms of the law and intellectual property
rights. We believe that Arts Council England has a role to play
in developing the opportunities and addressing these challenges.
We have a broader definition of the creative
industries that goes beyond the parameters of the Select Committee's
inquiry. Our definition includes music, theatre, dance, the visual
arts including architecture and craft, fashion, animation, design,
and software development, publishing, broadcasting, film and the
moving image. This wider definition is grounded in our understanding
of the arts sector and a recognition of the many new methods of
working and creativity that are constantly developing. We use
this broader definition in our response.
We recognise that in some areas, such as music,
we are a small but influential player in a multi-billion pound
industry; in others, such as dance, we are the main funder. We
are increasingly seeking partnerships with those working directly
in the creative industries to maximise the value of our investment
and to deliver our ambitions for the arts, seeking to take the
arts to places and to people who have previously not had access
to them, and making Britain the best place for artists to live
and work. We encourage different sectors of the creative environment
to work together for their mutual benefit. One example of this
is the work of architect David Adjaye has done for the Frieze
Art Fair, which has linked design with the international art market.
Our work as a national development agency helps
develop and sustain the creative economy in a number of ways:
— Creative people: we promote
creativity at all life stages through our targeted programmes
and work with our funded organisations. We believe that creativity
is crucial to the UK's "value added" economy and skills
development. We also support a wide range of organisations across
the country where participatory and educational activities help
build the audiences and artists of the future.
— Creative places: neighbourhoods,
cities and regions have been transformed through arts-led regeneration.
Key examples where our funding has helped this transformation
are Salford Quays, NewcastleGateshead, Bristol Harbourside and
the Hanley area of Stoke. In the North East investment in major
new cultural institutions such as BALTIC and Sage Gateshead has
been the catalyst for the £1 billion redevelopment of east
Gateshead leading to the creation of 10,000 jobs. BALTIC alone
has resulted in the creation of 60 full-time jobs plus a further
40 full-time jobs servicing the gallery's catering and bar functions.
Similar findings were revealed in a study of Salford Quays, which
estimated that 11,000 new jobs were created in the local community
with 6,500 of them attributable to The Lowry.
— Creative innovation: we support
creative risk and experiment in individuals and organisations,
recognising the role of the subsidised sector as a seedbed for
talent that may later move into the commercial sector. There is
considerable movement of talent between the "subsidised"
arts sector to the more commercial end of the creative industries
such as West End theatre, visual art, music, publishing and broadcasting.
Without our investment the commercial sector would be more constrained
and less successful.
— Creative organisations: we
are committed to helping modernise the organisations that make
up the arts infrastructure in this country. To that end support
organisational development and new business models. We seek to
share best practice and support knowledge transfer. Excellence
in design and communications are critical and traffic online has
increased the capacity of organisations such as Arnolfini, Baltic,
Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) and the Tate
to extend their cultural offer.
— Education: Our work in education
is key to new generations of creative producers and audiences,
and as a driver for the creative industries. Over the last decade
we have been developing and supporting initiatives that explore
the creative uses of digital and media technologies within different
learning contexts. Examples of this work are included in the appendix.
— International opportunities:
the arts in the UK are respected worldwide and are a key way of
presenting a positive, international image of modern, creative
"Britishness". The arts have played a major part in
the growth of creative industry export in the last 10 years. British
art has contributed hugely to the growth in tourist income—cultural
tourists come to see British theatre, visit Tate Modern, go on
a pilgrimage to Stratford or go to our many festivals. Many artists
have moved from being funded by the Arts Council to becoming international
talents contributing to Britain's world-class status and to our
creative economy. Examples include: Sam Mendes, Stephen Daldry,
Simon Rattle, David Pountney, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread and
Matthew Bourne.
— Technology: we encourage artists
and arts organisations to maximise the potential of developing
technologies to develop new work and create greater access to
work. Organisations such as New Work Network use the web as a
locus of activity for peer-to-peer knowledge development and commissioning
Forum. Others such as SCAN bring together partners from higher
education, creative industries and the museum sector in innovative
collaborations.
— Strategic initiatives: we
also create strategic initiatives to influence policy and practice
with respect to the impact of new media on all our lives—by
encouraging debate and dialogue across arts and science borders,
by setting up placements and fellowships and supporting network
based activities in collaboration with other partners in academia
and elsewhere. Arts Council England has been involved in many
initiatives rooted in the creative industries since the 1990s.
Through strategic funding, we have supported and developed new
media practices, including through the New Media Projects fund,
which ran for five years until 2002. This fund enabled over 70
projects to be delivered.
— Competition and Intellectual Property
(IP): we are working with partners to develop new contractual
models for artists and support structures for advice for those
moving between subsidised and commercial sectors. We are heavily
engaged with policy debates to best represent the needs of individual
and independent artists in diverse artforms and we are developing,
with partners, a code of best practice in relation to artists
and the law.
— Evidence: we are building
a robust body of evidence on the impact of the cultural industries
by documenting and sharing good practice and case studies of artists
and organisations working across subsidised and commercial borders,
exploring innovative distribution methods and regularly collaborating
with industry.
THE BROADER
CONTEXT FOR
THE CREATIVE
INDUSTRIES
Two recent Government papers have looked at
the creative industries. The arguments have been well made that
Britain's competitiveness cannot be based on undercutting competitors
on cost and therefore needs to be based on adding value. This
means making products more attractive through design, developing
innovative solutions to business problems, creating new markets
through brand association and marketing. We have recognised the
relevance of these arguments and have been working to ensure that
our investment bolsters and creates added value for the UK economy.
The DTI Economic Paper, Creativity, Design
and Business Performance,[3]
recognised that culture and place have an impact on many of the
drivers of creativity. It highlighted a number of crucial factors
to economic success, including the importance of education in
ensuring the supply of creativity and design skills in the labour
force. It recognised the impact that our Creative Partnerships
programme is having in this area.[4]
Our visual arts department promotes the creative uses of ICT in
formal and informal education and has stimulated debate on the
implications of new technology for education, which has challenged
traditional approaches to education. Similarly, the Cox Review
acknowledged the role of education and Creative Partnerships.
The review identified the position of the UK
as a world leader in many of the creative industries, such as
architecture, fashion, product design, advertising, the performing
arts, games software and many aspects of film and broadcasting.
In addition, it calculated that in 2003, they accounted for 8%
of Gross Value Added (GVA), contributed £11.6 billion to
the UK's balance of trade. Between 1997 and 2003, these industries
grew by an average of 6% per annum—three times the rate
of the economy as a whole.
There is significant work taking place investigating
the impact of new media and the creative industries and the Arts
Council is contributing to this.
Key initiatives are:
— the Creative Economy Programme developed
by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The Arts
Council feeds into all the working groups, including Intellectual
Property and Competitiveness. Sir Christopher Frayling, our chair,
is leading the working group on Education and Skills;
— the Oxford Media Convention on Strategy
and Regulation in the digital age, which took place on 19 January
2006;
— The Gowers Review of Intellectual
Property consults in March 2006; and
— The Westminster Media Forum debate
on Digital Rights Management and Intellectual Property takes place
on 14 March, co-sponsored by the Arts Council.
KEY ISSUES
Arts Council England welcomes the opportunities
that new media and technological developments create for artists
and the art sector. However, we are aware that, at the same time
as artists are presented with new ways to reach audiences and
test their creative boundaries, there are a number of challenges
presented to them with regard to the needs of audiences and their
rights as artists. As the development agency for the arts in England,
we believe we are uniquely placed to help balance those sometimes
conflicting needs and therefore detailed below for the Committee's
interest are some of the key issues that we are working to address.
The challenge for artists and arts organisations
The opportunities created by new media and the
creative industries are leading to a substantial shift in consumer
behaviour. Artists, producers and arts organisations are being
encouraged to recognise these trends. Libraries have been affected—losing
a quarter of their users in the past decade, while book sales
have risen. The BBC is facing unprecedented challenges from the
way digital channels have fragmented audiences.
There is no doubt that organisations need better
information about current and potential audiences, allied to more
effective strategies for marketing, customer relationship management
and audience development. Better information technology systems
will be vital. All arts organisations should be encouraged to
explore new channels and programming for emerging markets. Better
marketing by individual organisations will be just a small part
of the solution.
It is our role to support arts organisations
as they develop new business models and that to balance the need
to find new audiences and patterns of consumption with support
for the kind of live experience that only the arts can deliver.
Artists and the law
As a development agency for the arts and artists,
the Arts Council has to consider the two aspects of intellectual
property rights: the need to balance rewarding the artist for
their creation; and the need to ensure that work reaches the widest
possible audience.
We believe legal systems that support contemporary
creativity need to be sufficiently flexible to address both these
needs—enabling artists whilst not restricting access and
use. There is a role for the public sector in relation to enabling
innovation. We give examples of how we might encourage this below.
The rights of creative people are primarily
expressed within copyright law. There are currently two major
forces that shape the law. In most countries, intellectual property
laws are developed in relation to the needs and creative imperatives
of larger scale creative industries, such as movie and music businesses.
At the international level, such laws are now shaped primarily
by the rules governing international trade. Many creative practices
and strategies fall outside the narrow protection of copyright
law. Some creative work also runs the risk of breaking the law,
as legal systems often do not take account of the network and
distributed nature of contemporary art. Low cost legal advice
may not be available to artists to ensure that they use licences
and contracts as well as they should. Currently, very little attention
has been paid to the needs of artists, smaller media players and
the requirements of emerging forms of creative practice.
The challenge with new systems of digital rights
management will be to ensure that they are flexible and responsive
enough to make sure they enhance rather than inhibit creativity.
New solutions need to be found to make sure this happens. A "one
size fits all" response will not work. As fluid models of
distribution emerge in response to technological innovation, so
sophisticated rights management solutions need to be found to
support today's creative artists. Government has a role to play
in making sure that competition and innovation are encouraged
appropriately.
In practice, artists can be quite pragmatic
about copyright law: sometimes licensing the copyright in their
works to other distributors; sometimes appropriating other peoples'
work to generate something new; and sometimes giving their work
away free for others to reuse. There are also new creative pressures
on content producers caused by the focus on secondary exploitation
rights and their potential revenues.
We are working with partners to develop a series
of recommendations in this area—a code of good practice
for artists. This will include surveying artists' income sources,
new trends in distribution and their impact on systems of ownership,
contracts and the negotiation of intellectual property rights.
We believe that artists will welcome this and make a contribution
to the Government's developing approach to innovation and the
creative industries.
The Arts Council is very well aware of these
issues. Since 2001, our interdisciplinary arts team has undertaken
a number of initiatives:
— We have supported two major conferences,
CODE (Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy) in
association with Cambridge University and Music & Technology
(in association with the Royal Society of Arts).
— We have held one-day events, such
as Intellectual Property and the Public Domain Summit (with
the Royal Society of Arts) and Ways of Working 2—Appropriation
and Collaboration in Contemporary Arts Practice (with University
of Westminster).
— We have supported the testing of
Creative Commons licensing in the UK in collaboration with
Oxford University.
— We have supported the development
of the Open Business project in association with international
partners in Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.
— We have supported the development
of Artquest's Q&A National Pilot that provides free
legal support for artists.
— We are currently working on a major
Artists and the Law programme, which will examine provision
and developing need for legal services across arts forms.
— We are working with Own-it and Artquest,
on the possibility of developing a national pilot to provide legal
and business support in a joined-up way across the English regions.
— Members of the Interdisciplinary
Arts Department have attended at least 10 conferences, seminars
and workshops on intellectual property in the last year in order
to keep abreast of current developments in the field.
— We are in close contact with leading
intellectual property academics and specialist intellectual property
units at Oxford, Cambridge, Queen Mary (London) and Edinburgh
in the UK and with Stanford and Duke Universities in the US.
— All the above work is being developed
in relation to the broader agenda of the "Artists Time Space
and Money" project, which is examining the economic status
of the artist and creative practitioner across the board.
POLICY DEVELOPMENT
Art form policies
We are currently developing a new suite of art
form policies. These will focus on music, theatre, dance, visual
arts, literature and interdisciplinary arts. They will be published
later this year. The policies will recognise the development of
the creative industries and the interaction between the creative
industries and the subsidised arts sector. They will recognise
the impact that technology is having on the arts, making it possible
for many more people to participate in them, creating, performing,
recording and distributing their own work. Technology also has
the potential to increase the impact and reach of all arts organisations.
We will encourage greater exploitation of existing and developing
technology to extend the audience for the arts and to bring wider
exposure for the sectors that we fund. To this end we will seek
to further develop our partnerships with national broadcasters.
In music, our long-term ambition is for the majority of the work
of our leading companies to be accessible to the whole country
through broadcasting and webcasting. We recognise that while this
is a huge opportunity for the arts and for audiences, it does
create some new challenges in the area of intellectual property.
We will be working with arts organisations, with government and
with other partners to address these challenges. (See Artists
and the law.)
We recognise that in a technology-rich world
the live event is even more powerful and we will continue to support
the development of those live experiences. From Glastonbury to
the BBC Proms, from melas to carnival, from major arts centres
to local community centres, the live arts have the power to unite
communities locally, nationally and internationally.
Distribution policy
We are also developing a distribution policy
for publication later this year. We support the distribution of
all kinds of art, making sure that the type of distribution is
appropriate and efficient. Our distribution policy will focus
on: live touring, publishing, broadcasting, and digitisation and
will also consider the impact of new forms of distribution on
income generation possibilities for artists, and the role that
new technologies and ownership (intellectual property and copyright
issues) play in this respect. We recognise there are many exciting
opportunities involved in the exploitation of these new distribution
challenges and we seek to make our policies as responsive and
contemporary as possible to enable new talent to thrive and survive
and to reach new audiences in appropriate ways. We believe that
new distribution opportunities can offer extremely exciting ways
to do this.
Major music companies are now also recognising
the potential of new media distribution, as are broadcasters like
the BBC, which is in the cutting edge of podcasting. Our concern
is to ensure that independents also find ways of capitalising
on these possibilities.
The Arts Council is already experimenting with
legal and business models when we commission new work and developing
these to meet the opportunities presented by digitisation and
the Internet. For example, we are studying the use of the Creative
Commons licences in large-scale schools and community arts projects
that will be filmed and shown by a major broadcaster.
Distribution has been at the heart of the Arts
Council's work from its inception in 1946, when work began on
assembling what is now the largest loan collection of modern and
contemporary British art in the world. The South Bank Centre's
Hayward Gallery manages the Arts Council Collection and uses it
to create regular touring exhibitions around England. In addition,
throughout our history, we have directly funded a wide range of
performing arts organisations to tour their work throughout England.
In 2005-06, we invested over £59 million in core funding
to national live touring organisations.
We have also moved quickly to respond to changing
consumer patterns. For example, in an innovative partnership with
the Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre, we have recently
made available to the general public, free of charge on the Internet,
a wide range of back issues of poetry magazines. We are now working
with the South Bank Centre on a project to digitise the Arts Council
Collection. We have a partnership with the University of Westminster
to digitise and make available for research and educational purposes
the Arts Council's Film Collection.
We want to continue to expand the range of spaces
within which art is presented, and the media by which it is distributed.
We will do this by building upon our partnerships with local authorities,
broadcasters, publishers and new media distributors as well as
by forging new partnerships with organisations that we believe
could play a key role within the arts infrastructure of the future.
Examples of our expanded field of engagement include support of
software for autonomous internet programmes by Irrational.org,
virtual reality artworks by Blast Theory, Can you See Me Now and
Desert Rain, and artists internet radio station Resonance FM.
We are also key investors of research and development often in
the context of partnership with the creative industries such as
MELT, a partnership between BBC, Channel Four, the Producers Alliance
for Cinema and Television (PACT), Yorkshire Forward and Yorkshire
Screen.
Diversification is at the heart of our vision.
Consumer patterns will continue to change rapidly and the artists
and organisations we fund need to be at the forefront in responding
to consumer demand. This will involve re-imagining what an arts
experience can be for people, and thinking creatively about the
different ways in which art can be distributed. We believe that
the internet holds many opportunities for new forms of creative
expression, which will be increasingly diverse and it is vital
that the legal frameworks supporting this emergence also encourage
and foster diversity and freedom of expression, development of
independent and exciting new voices.
Music
Music is a particular area of interest for those
looking at the possibilities for new media and technology. Recent
technological developments have made music easily transferable
between hardware and online communities. An obvious demonstration
of this is the popularity of MP3 players, where it is possible
for users to transfer music and download further tracks free of
charge, even though it remains illegal to make such copies of
music in the UK without payment. Record companies are becoming
increasingly more protective of their material because of this,
and an increase in music piracy. CDs are now likely to be copy
protected and online broadcasts are likely to be encrypted or
require listeners to pay a fee for access.
Visual arts
The Committee will be aware of our submission
to their previous consultation into the Market for Art, in which
we outlined the issues facing artists and the art sector and what
Arts Council England was doing to ensure that artists were being
sufficiently supported. While we do not intend to revisit our
submission here, it is worth noting some of the points raised
because of their connection to the overall health of the creative
industries.
The art sector relies on the processes by which
works of art are commissioned, researched, produced, promoted,
presented, bought and sold and how creativity is converted into
commercial value. This commercial value is significant to the
overall UK economy with total sales for the United Kingdom in
1998 of £3,287 million or €4,765.1 million, representing
over 60% of the European Union art trade.[5]
Further analysis undertaken by Arts Council England[6]
estimated that the value of sales through contemporary commercial
galleries and open studios in England was worth £354.5 million
in 2003, while international sales of London based commercial
galleries and agents are likely to be at least double this figure.[7]
Further analysis of market sales suggests that the total market
for original craft is £883 million.[8]
If the UK is to remain a world leader in visual
arts and crafts, it is imperative that it embraces new media and
technological developments. We have therefore worked to empower
artists with the right skills and understanding to adapt to the
changing working environment. Examples of this include:
— Artist Professional Development (APD)
Network, funded by Arts Council England as part of Creative People
programme, is a small but increasingly influential resource for
artists. The APD Network initiated by a-n in July 2001, is a UK-wide
intelligence and exchange forum for organisations that are proactively
developing information, advisory, training and professional development
services for visual and applied artists. Members range from artist-led
organisations to cultural industries bodies and higher education
institutions.
— Artquest offers advice and information
to professional visual artists and craftspeople in London through
a website, email and telephone helpline, advice sessions, events
and initiatives. With a grant from Arts Council England, Artquest
is currently testing a national legal advisory service for visual
artists.
— Studio spaces are vital because artists
need somewhere affordable and sustainable to work. The provision
of artists' workspace is a priority of the Arts Capital Programme.
To date, we have invested approximately £69 million[9]
through capital funds.
— Private View and Animate commissions
for artists by the BBC and Channel Four respectively. Critical
for equipping artists with production experience in a professional
broadcast context and also for ensuring Arts Council England is
a broker of creative innovation.
— We have encouraged and consolidated
vital promotion, critical discussion and professional networking
of new media artists, curator/producers and practice through high
profile partnership based events such as our British New Media
Art conference at Tate Britain in 2004 and more recently we supported
the independent initiated Curating, Immateriality, Systems a conference
on curating digital media at Tate Modern in 2005. Baltic in Newcastle-upon-Tyne
has established a unique series of publications and conferences
stimulating professional development around practice and curating.
Through these strategic and funded initiatives we have responded
to the need for flexibility and exchange across a range of specialist
funded and commercial sectors.
— We funded Wireless London, a report
and Wireless Festival delivered in 2005 which explored recent
developments in wireless networking (WLAN) in London by comparing
a range of networks built by freenetwork groups, commercial hotspot
providers, and public sector initiatives recommending the need
to encourage public sector led enterprises and partnerships and
the development of WLAN in the home.
Broadcasting strategy
As part of our distribution policy we are developing
a strategy for our engagement with broadcasters. We believe that
broadcasting offers a mechanism for growing the audience for the
arts, making the case for the value of the arts, and giving artists
a space to create and develop new work.
Arts Council England has partnerships with all
the major broadcasters—BBC, Channel Four, FIVE and to a
lesser extent ITV. Over the past few years we have developed a
long-term partnership with the BBC, expressed in a Memorandum
of Understanding (MOU). The BBC and Arts Council England have
considered how they could work together more effectively by establishing
a partnership to deliver complementary objectives for the development
of the arts and arts broadcasting across England. As the largest
patrons of the arts in England, we support and nurture artists,
providing new commissions for writers and performers, backing
creative risk taking and innovation and we have a shared cultural
entitlement agenda. We are committed to working across platforms
and between the "live" and broadcast arts sectors with
the objective of building and sustaining audiences for the arts
and fostering the country's creative talent. A copy of this MOU
is provided in the appendix along with details of current projects
that are of interest to this inquiry.
RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT
Arts Council England has engaged with external
partners to develop ideas and investigate issues relating to new
media and the creative industries. These areas of research and
development include:
Digital convergence and media technology
— Building on many years of engagement
with new media technologies and the arts,[10]
we recently organised in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) and Watershed Media Centre, Bristol the
"Up To Speed": The Potential of Broadband as a New
Space for Research, Development and Production event. This
event explored the potential for high-speed broadband networks
as a new space for cultural research, production and distribution
and drew together researchers, creative industries, arts and media
practitioners and policy makers including the Department for Trade
and Industry (DTI) to address the key challenges and opportunities
in collaborative partnerships and knowledge transfer between these
sectors.
— We are producing case studies of
innovative partnerships across the arts and commercial sectors—one
example is Under Blue Skies, involved a partnership between
Arts Council England, the Watershed Media Centre and Hewlett Packard.
Details for this example are provided in the appendix.
— Arts Council England also contributes
to the DCMS Creative Industries and Higher Education Forum and
plays a key role in the forum's research and knowledge transfer
task group. This group offers opportunities for knowledge exchange
between arts, humanities and sciences in the interests of innovation
at research and development stages. The group produced a paper
("Unweaving the Rainbow: research, innovation and risk
in the creative economy") that recommends a re-evaluation
of the current limitations of the current classification framework
for research and development in the creative industries. The group
will also be feeding into the forthcoming review of Intellectual
Property Rights set up by the Chancellor and the Minister for
the Creative Industries. Arts Council England will be working
closely with the AHRC, which leads this task group to represent
the interests of the public sector and ideas of public value in
relation to the forum and the review.
— We invest in a range of challenging
projects such as Marisa Carnesky's Ghost Train which was a full
scale working ride using audio-visual. It was toured to east London,
Birmingham, Glastonbury Festival and Manchester. Another example
includes Ghost Ship; a partnership between Locus + and the Southampton
University Marine engineering department, and the artist Chris
Burden. This project gained wide national coverage. It involved
a computer aided boat sailing unmanned from the Fair Isles to
Newcastle as part of the international Tall Ships Race. Mute magazine
has just switched to being produced through print on demand (POD)
technology and have added a facility for users to make their own
personalised collections of POD content, straight from the website.
— The ArtPark project, currently in
development, involves the creation of an enhanced technical infrastructure
for FACT that will support future development and needs within
the media arts sector and create a strong technical platform for
the organisation. It will provide a national support structure
for web based artwork, a resource and archive facility for new
media art and an online environment linking a number of community-based
remote access points (satellites) to FACT's facilities and resources.
— Arts Council England is represented
on the DCMS Live Music Forum. The aim of this Forum is to work
with the music industry and other key stakeholders to promote
the performance of live music and to monitor the impact of the
Licensing Act 2003 on this artform. The forum is charged with
responsibility to implement initiatives that will promote the
performance of live music.
— Arts Council England encourages the
research and development of practice essential to new media work
through our regularly funded organisations. The Digital Research
Unit based in Huddersfield, crosses over with contemporary art,
new media creative industries and higher education and facilitates
the creative research ambitions for artists.
Arts and the Law
Arts Council England is undertaking a long-term
programme of activity about art and law, which began in 2001.
A key starting project for this work was a conference with CODE
(Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy) looking at
how innovation is stimulated by means of collaboration, networking
and new models of intellectual property including open source
approaches within software. In 2004 we supported the Intellectual
Property and the Public Domain Summit at the Royal Society of
Arts. This brought together artists, activists, and industry representatives
to examine the role of IP in terms of new business models, innovation
and public access to cultural materials.
— On intellectual property and new
business models, we held The Music and Technology conference
in association with the Royal Society of Arts, which included
many speakers from industry as well as lawyers and consumer groups.
Ways of Working 2 examined the artist's relationship to
the developing relationship with copyright law.
— The Open Business Project—is
an international project with partners in Argentina, Brazil and
South Africa, examining and indexing new modes of business that
are developing in relation to a changing intellectual property
environment. This includes an online resource that collates and
distributes information about new models of business and cultural
practice. The project has only been running for a few months and
is already receiving 4,000 hits a week.
One key area of work concerning artists and
the law is that surrounding the use of the Creative Commons licences.
The Creative Commons licences, which are now part of UK law, provide
access to digital materials and, under certain conditions, permit
the creative use of copyrighted material. Prior to their adoption
into our legal framework, Arts Council England worked in collaboration
with Oxford University, holding a joint workshop with a dozen
artists to test the licenses. We are currently working with the
BBC Creative Archive on a one-year project that supports two artists,
to look at a licensing system they have developed that is similar
to the Creative Commons licences, to produce new works within
the Creative Archive project. We are currently assessing the use
of these licences in conjunction with the Young Foundation and
the Open Society Institute. A report on this project will be available
in early spring.
Conclusion
New media and the creative industries are becoming
increasingly important to all the work of artists and arts organisations.
While our development work in this area has been going on for
some time, it is only in the last few years that its value has
been recognised in an economic and international context by other
organisations and Government.
Our submission outlines some of the areas of
our new media and the creative industries activity. There is a
great deal more happening within our sector that we have not included,
not least because some of the work is yet to be completed. However,
the next few years will be significant for our policies in this
area, and as Government becomes more aware of the direct benefits
of supporting these areas of the economy, the more we can showcase
the crucial work of those artists and arts organisations within
it.
However, we believe there are two matters outlined
in our submission that the Committee may wish to focus on. Firstly,
issues concerning artists and the law, particularly developments
around digital rights management systems. We believe that the
Government has a role to play in making sure that competition
and innovation are encouraged appropriately, and this has to be
balanced against the needs of artists. Additionally, we have noted
in our submission that there is a need for appropriate training
and low-cost legal solutions for artists and arts organisations
around their legal rights. While Arts Council England is working
in this area, the Committee's support for ensuring appropriate
support mechanisms would be welcome. Finally, we would remind
the Committee of our Arts Council England distribution policy
(p.10), which we believe provides a mechanism for engaging some
of the challenges and opportunities the Committee is addressing.
We also welcome your support for this approach.
28 February 2006
1 The Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building
on the UK's strengths. Back
2
DCMS Creative Industries Fact File. Back
3
DTI Economic Paper No 15-Creativity, Design and Business Performance. Back
4
"Creative Partnerships, the Government's flagship contribution
to creativity in school education seeks to address this by involving
creative organisations in projects that focus on developing literacy
and numeracy skills but do so in a way that also enhances and
engages children's creativity." Back
5
Market Tracking International Company Limited (MTIC) (2000) The
European Art Market 2000, London: The European Fine Art Foundation
(TEFAF). Back
6
Morris, Hargreaves and McIntyre (2004), Taste buds: how to cultivate
the art market: executive summary. London: Arts Council England. Back
7
Louisa Buck (2004), Market Matters: The Dynamics of the Contemporary
Art Market, Arts Council England. Back
8
Morris, Hargreaves and McIntyre (2005), Making it to Market:
Developing the Market for Contemporary Fine Craft, Arts Council
England. Back
9
Based on all capital awards to visual arts projects over past
10 years to artists studios/workspaces. Back
10
Arts Council England provided the UK Representation on the Council
of Europe's Culture, Communication and New Technologies Committee
in 1998-2000. Back
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